Interviews

I have known Steven for more than a decade. Not only is he a top technology journalist and a consummate professional, he is a role model of mine.

Steven, well known by his initials SJVN, stands out -- not just because he's a good journalist. He stands out because he's a great explainer. When I want to understand a networking, operating systems, or Linux-related topic, I often turn to Steven or his articles.

Again, this goes back to the idea of open collaboration. A product gets better with more contributors than just a few of them. A large community gets built around a certain product, which helps it gain validation and feedback from a large audience. The beauty lies in seeing the product get better and better with contributions from a large vibrant set of users.

This year I have been working with Bhumika Goyal on making various kernel structures read-only. We have constified over 1500 structures this year. This work has also motivated various bug fixes and performance improvements in Coccinelle.

I have also been working on automatically identifying patches that should be considered for backporting to stable kernels, in collaboration with Greg K-H, Sasha Levin, and colleagues at Singapore Management University. Our approach is still work in progress, but several hundred commits that were not originally tagged for stable have been identified and applied to stable versions.

I started using Linux few years ago out of curiosity when my old computer started to get slow and wanted to try something lighter. At the time, I had a disk of Fedora lying around from a conference and managed to get it installed and working. Since then, I started using it for everyday tasks to get more familiar with the alternative software. I really liked the fact that I could select any distro I wanted and have full control of the operating system. I also used Linux for university projects and started to better understand how to use the utilities and services. Open source projects caught my attention when I started using them on my first job as they gave me the ability to adjust the features and code to my needs but also to contribute back to the community. I then started visiting open source conferences to get more involved and became a big fan of the initiative.

In October, Linux PC maker System76 released its homegrown version of Linux, Pop!_OS, giving users the choice between its legacy Ubuntu operating system or the new Pop!_OS flavor of Linux. Recently Opensource.com gave away a System76 laptop with Pop!_OS installed, which made me curious about the company and this new version of Linux, so I spoke with Cassidy James Blaede, Pop!_OS's user experience (UX) designer.

Blaede joined System76 in 2014, fresh out of college at the University of Northern Iowa and marriage to his wife, Katie. While in college, he co-founded the elementary OS project and interned at UX consultancy Visual Logic, both of which influenced his work for System76. He started at System76 as a front-end developer and was later promoted to UX architect.

Vipul Siddharth is an intern at Red Hat. He is pursuing a bachelors degree in computer applications from Christ University in Bengaluru, India. Vipul started using Linux in 2015 His first distribution was Fedora and despite trying Arch, Elementary and others Fedora remains his primary operating system.

Siddarth’s current daily routine starts with working out, the college and finally the office. He is currently working on Fedora Cloud. “Now I am working on building a testing framework for fedora cloud.” Along with this, he regularly contributes to Fedora Quality Assurance. Vipul also organizes FOSS and Fedora events. “I have organized Fedora activity days and fedora-release parties for Fedora 25 and 26.”

Siddharth’s childhood hero was Goku from Dragon Ball Z. “I wanted to eat, laugh and protect the world like him. I kinda still do.” Vipul’s favorite movies are 12 Angry Men and The Godfather (I, II and III)

I love space, I love how mysterious and dangerous it is and to be able to fly around in a game like Helium Rain [Steam] is fantastic. I decided to have a chat with the developer and they’re very positive about Linux gaming.

We’ve covered Helium Rain here a few times before, so hopefully some of you will be familiar with it. Without further rambling, let's begin!

The Linux Kernel community should continue its focus on adding support for new hardware, harden the security, and improve quality. Focusing on effective ways to proactively detect security vulnerabilities, race conditions, and hard-to-find problems will help towards achieving the above goals. As a process issue, community would have to take a close look at the maintainer to developer ratio to avoid maintainer fatigue and bottlenecks.

The report states that, since the 2.6.11 release, the top 10 developers together have contributed 45,338 changes — almost 7.1 percent of the total. The top 30 developers contributed just under 16 percent of the total, as seen in the table below.

One of these top 30 developers is Thomas Gleixner, CTO at Linutronix GmbH, who serves in various kernel maintainer roles. In this article, Gleixner answers a few questions about his contributions to the Linux kernel.

Dedoimedo prowls the many corners of the Web, searching for textogenic faces for a fresh new interview. Truth to be told, finding the candidate for today's slot wasn't too difficult. Roy Schestowitz is a familiar name round the Tux block. Nowadays, you will most likely find him on tuxmachines.org, a community-driven news site.

News aggregation can be tricky; finding the right balance of quality content isn't easy, but even with the relatively recent change of ownership, tuxmachines marches on with solid consistency, ardently trying to offer its readers the best the open-source world has to report. I have always been a great fan and supporter, and I approached Roy for an interview. He agreed.

More in Tux Machines

KDE Says Its Next Plasma Desktop Release Will Start a Full Second Faster

According to the developer, the upcoming KDE Plasma 5.13 desktop environment release will start a full second faster than previous versions because of the removal of the QmlObjectIncubationController component, which apparently slowed down the entire desktop, and promises to let users pin apps on the panel that contain spaces in their desktop file names.
Goodies are also coming to the upcoming KDE Applications 18.04 software suite this spring, which makes creating of new files with the Dolphin file manager instantaneous, improves drag-and-drop support from Spectacle to Chromium, and lets users configure the Gwenview image viewer to no longer display the image action buttons on thumbnails when they hover with the mouse cursor over them.

Intel Coffee Lake OpenGL Performance On Windows 10 vs. Linux

For those curious about the state of Intel's open-source Mesa OpenGL driver relative to the company's closed-source Windows OpenGL driver, here are some fresh benchmark results when making use of an Intel Core i7 8700K "Coffee Lake" processor with UHD Graphics 630 and testing from Windows 10 Pro x64 against Ubuntu 16.04.3 LTS, Ubuntu with the Linux 4.16 Git kernel and Mesa 18.1-dev, and then Intel's own Clear Linux distribution.

Why open source could be IBM's key to future success in the cloud

Do those same developers need IBM? Developers certainly benefit from IBM's investments in open source, but it's not as clear that those same developers have much to gain from IBM's cloud. Google, for example, has done a stellar job open sourcing code like TensorFlow and Kubernetes that feeds naturally into running related workloads on Google Cloud Platform. Aside from touting its Java bonafides, however, IBM has yet to demonstrate that developers get significant benefits for modern workloads on its cloud.
That's IBM's big challenge: Translating its open source expertise into real, differentiated value for developers on its cloud.

Top 8 Debian-Based Distros

Most people tend to forget that despite Ubuntu's success over the years, it's still just a distro based on another distro - Debian. Debian on its own, however, isn't really well suited for newer users...hence the explosion of distros based on Debian over the recent years. There are lot of great choices for Linux users. Which one is best for you?